The Oracle of Hizbullah Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah

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TheOracleofHizbullah:SayyidMuhammadHusaynFadlallah

The prerecorded audiocassette market of Beirut is one of the more sensitive measures of the city’s fever. In the 1970s it was dominated by immensely popular tapes of Palestinian nationalist hymns. But in the mid-1980s, according to a Lebanese weekly,these lost their market share to the record-breaking sales of cassettes bearing the voiceof a Shi‘ite cleric. In the marketplace of inspiration-on-demand, nothing could match thetapes of Friday sermons delivered by Ayatollah Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah.One vendor, operating from a cassette store in the neighborhood of Fadlallah’s mosquein a poor Shi‘ite quarter of Beirut, taped the sermon each week from the pulpit. Theentrepreneur claimed to have sold more than a hundred thousand copies throughoutLebanon. Orders also arrived from West Africa and the United States, centers of theLebanese Shi‘ite diaspora. Heavy demand doubledthe price of many tapes.Fadlallah spoke for Hizbullah, “the party of God,” amovement of Lebanese Shi‘ites that captured theworld’s attention beginning in 1982. Obscure mencarried out the acts of violence that made Hizbullahrenowned—suicide bombings, airliner hijackings,hostage takings. But it was the ubiquitous Fadlallahwho processed the rage of Hizbullah into speech, insermons and lectures, on tape and in print. Bornealoft on a wind of words, he made himself the voiceof Hizbullah’s conscience and its spokesman to theworld. His very ubiquity suggested that he led themovement, a supposition that drew diplomats,mediators, and assassins to his door. Turban,beard, and spectacles combined in a countenance that, alone among the faces of God’spartisans, became internationally famous and infamous. Fadlallah’s place in themovement eluded definition; the precise boundaries of his role ran through Hizbullah’ssecret space. But in no other single instance did individual and collective needs soobviously combine for mutual gratification. Hizbullah’s deeds amplified Fadlallah’s words,carrying his voice far beyond his own pulpit to the wider world. Fadlallah’s wordsinterpreted and justified Hizbullah’s deeds, transforming resentment into resistance.Fadlallah personified the role of leaders in the emergence and transformation of contemporary Islamic movements. Islamic fundamentalism is deeply rooted in the socialand economic crisis that has overwhelmed so many peoples of the Middle East and NorthAfrica, and its power cannot be understood as the achievement of a few individualleaders. Yet the appearance of dynamic leaders has constituted a necessary condition for

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the forging of discontent into discipline, and the creation of organized movements. WhenBernard Lewis wrote his prescient essay on “The Return of Islam” in 1975, he attributedthe failure of earlier Islamic movements to an absence of such leadership:One reason for their lack of success is that those who have made the attempt have beenso unconvincing. This still leaves the possibility of a more convincing leadership, andthere is ample evidence in virtually all Muslim countries of the deep yearning for such aleadership and a readiness to respond to it. The lack of an educated and modernleadership has so far restricted the scope of Islam and inhibited religious movementsfrom being serious contenders for power. But it is already effective as a limiting factorand may yet become a powerful domestic political force if the right kind of leadershipemerges.Such leadership appeared several years later in the person of Ayatollah RuhollahKhomeini, who launched a movement that swept aside Iran’s monarchy and establisheda regime of divine justice. As the 1980s unfolded, more leaders emerged as additionalIslamic movements gained momentum—leaders who had mastered the power topersuade, and who knew enough of the discourse of modernity to puncture it. Theyconvinced masses of people that a return to Islam meant not a step backward, but aleap forward into a postmodern world where the preeminent values of the West would bechallenged by their own adherents. The certainties of Islam would prevail, and believerswho held tightly to them would be empowered. The logic of these new leaders was acombination of the Cartesian and the Qur’anic, and they appealed directly to thosescarred deeply by religious doubt, especially the ever more numerous young. In the spanof a few years, these leaders came to stand at the head of mass movements, wellpositioned to bid for ultimate political power.Hizbullah arose in Lebanon from a fusion of many discontents. It drew upon Shi‘itefrustration with endemic poverty and the collapse of civil society into civil war. Itreceived inspiration and direct support from Islamic Iran and won a following amongthose who suffered as a result Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. It benefited from theindulgence of Syria and the fragmentation of Lebanon’s Shi‘ites themselves. Yet it isdifficult to imagine how Hizbullah would have evolved without the omnipresence of Fadlallah. Others may have made Hizbullah’s choices, but the movement bore his mark.For he was Hizbullah’s oracle—a fount of infallible (if ambiguous) guidance, fed by anunfathomably deep well of wisdom. He rallied the masses to the movement, and thenkept them from following paths to self-destruction. The movement and the manguaranteed one another’s survival—and together they wrote history.

Precocious Poet

Fadlallah was born in the Iraqi Shi‘ite shrine city of Najaf on 16 November 1935. Hisfather, Sayyid ‘Abd al-Ra’uf Fadlallah, had migrated there from the village of ‘Aynata in

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South Lebanon in 1928 to pursue religious learning. Najaf sits astride the sluggishEuphrates, on a baked plain 150 kilometers south of Baghdad. At the heart of this city of domes is the revered tomb of the Imam ‘Ali, the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law. In past times of prosperity and peace, this gateway to the predominantly Shi‘itesouth of Iraq teemed with pilgrims from throughout the Shi‘ite world, who soughtcommunion with God and fed the city’s hoards of beggars. But Najaf also encouragedanother kind of purposeful travel, for alongside the shrines were some of the mostrenowned Shi‘ite seminaries of learning. Great ayatollahs, scholars, and studentsassembled from throughout the Shi‘ite world—the majority from Iran, others from Iraq,Lebanon, the Arab Gulf, Afghanistan, and the Indian subcontinent. In Najaf they studiedsacred law, theology, and philosophy, according to the medieval pedagogical methods of the Islamic seminary. The schools were free of government control and submitted to noexternal academic authority. No presidents, deans, or masters presided. The ayatollahsmaintained their seminaries through donations and alms, which arrived from throughoutthe Shi‘ite world. Students paid no tuition, teachers received no salaries; all drew smallstipends which allowed them to pursue pious learning in conditions of the utmostausterity. Some eventually returned to their own lands to preach; others spent lifetimesin the seminaries. Stories of deprivation and hunger suffered by students and teachersfilled many memoirs of life in Najaf, but all attested to the city’s tenacious hold uponthose who dwelled within it.Upon entering the city, pilgrims and scholars stepped out of time. Shi‘ism had survivedas a negation of temporal Islamic history. In the Shi‘ite view, the ship of Islam had beenrun aground immediately after the death of the Prophet by those who ignored hisspecific instruction that his son-in-law ‘Ali be placed at its helm. Later the usurperswould compound the crime of disobedience with that of murder, when they slew ‘Ali’sson, Husayn rather than recognize his divine right to rule. There followed a succession of violations against the just claims of ‘Ali’s descendants and their supporters. They andtheir truths were forced underground by a false Islam. So thoroughly did the usurperssuppress truth that the Shi‘ite tradition did not expect wrongs to be righted before theend of eschatological time. The partisans of ‘Ali nursed their grievances, mourned theirmartyrs, and scoffed at the wars waged by false Muslims for the expansion and defenseof Islam. For them, history itself had gone into hiding. Nowhere did temporal time seemso completely suspended as in Najaf and Karbala, the burial places of ‘Ali and Husayn.There Shi‘ites came as pilgrims to lament the injustices of this world, and there theywere brought for burial to speed them to the next. Najaf did not always know tranquility,but a succession of Sunni Islamic empires recognized its sacred character and grantedimmunities that formed a wall around the city.The sacred space on the Euphrates traditionally gripped the imagination of young Shi‘itesin Jabal ‘Amil, the mountainous south of Lebanon. Through some study in Najaf, one